In 1948, Atlanta added eight black men to its police force. This was at a time when, as author Thomas Mullen explains, a 1947 Newsweek article "estimated that one-quarter of Atlanta policemen were, in fact, members of the Ku Klux Klan."Those pioneer police officers were the inspiration for Mullen's new novel, Darktown, a blend of history, mystery and violence that explores racial tensions in post-World War II Atlanta.Today, the city is known as one of the most progressive in the South. Proudly dubbed "The City Too Busy to Hate," it never erupted into the racial violence that made other large Southern metropolises infamous.But the city wasn't too busy to keep its African-American citizens in their assigned "place." Small wonder that the decision to incorporate a handful of black rookies into the APD caused such uproar.Knowing there would be stiff, maybe violent, resistance to the rookies' presence, Chief Herbert Jenkins assigned them a separate space. Instead of working from police
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